The last great forest

Retezat national park in Romania is arguably the most precious piece of ancient woodland left in Europe. So why is someone trying to bulldoze a highway through it? Stephen Moss braves the bears, wolves and golden eagles to find out

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. There's a chunk of virgin Romanian forest about to be ravaged by some bloody road. It's supposedly Europe's most precious scrap of ancient forest. And think of the bears, the wolves, the lynx, the golden eagles, the lesser-spotted tree frogs that will be terrorised by the tractors, steamrollered by the ... steamrollers. I'm there.

And I am, I really am. In a freezing log cabin next to a hunting lodge that used to be President Ceausescu's, 1,800 feet up a mountain in the Southern Carpathians, accompanied by a Romanian ranger, an Alaskan Malamute called Alf, and an American photographer called Spencer. The cabin has not been used for four months; it is cold and dusty; I suffer an allergic reaction and cannot sleep; in fact I can barely breathe. There is no running water. Alf, ears pricked, is on guard outside. Spencer, who is used to war zones, sleeps like a log. I try to think of the plight of the tree frog.

Before we turned in for the night, the ranger, Florin Halastauan (nicknamed "Hombre"), Alf and I had gone for a short walk. The path was icy and I managed to slip and cut my hand within about four seconds of leaving the cabin. This was largely because of the wholly inappropriate footwear I had brought - a 30-year-old pair of Dr Martens. It was at this point that I started to doubt the wisdom of the enterprise.

Then there are the bears, common hereabout. I get conflicting advice about what to do if confronted by one. "Make a lot of noise," suggests Gabriele Paun, programme campaigner for Greenpeace and the man leading the campaign to stop the DN66A being driven through the forest west of the town of Petrosani in the Jiu valley. "Just don't panic," says Hombre, my bearded, survivalist guide. "They're more scared of you than you are of them. It's only dangerous if they can't smell you. If you come upon them unexpectedly, they might fight." I stay close to the lupine Alf.

Hombre has been a ranger in the Retezat national park, where we are spending this cold and sleepless (Spencer excepted) night, for four years. He used to be a steelworker in the town of Hunedoara, 40km (25 miles) north of here, but was one of many who lost his job as industry in the region contracted. He loves the outdoor life, but says the pay - about €300 (£200) a month - is lousy.

Retezat, which in 1935 became Romania's first national park, comprises 38,000 hectares (147 sq miles) of forest, mountains and lakes; it is a haven for flora, fauna and, in summer, eco-tourists. It is not quite virgin forest, though there are virgin areas in the so-called "biosphere reserve" which are kept untouched for scientific research. But it is what Greenpeace calls "intact" - an area sufficiently close to its natural state for the original ecosystem to function. Further west, outside the park, are even less accessible tracts of forest, where only the hardiest hiker might tread. Impossible to get there in winter; and probably impossible at any time wearing a 30-year-old pair of Dr Martens.

Paun claims that all this is threatened by the DN66A, which is being extended from the town of Uricani in the Jiu valley to the spa town of Baile Herculane, close to the Danube. A 10km start was made on it in 1999, championed by the then transport minister Traian Basescu. Basescu is now president of Romania and has made completing the job a personal crusade; he has been to the area twice in the past few months to check progress. The existing forest track is being turned into a two-lane highway, with the project due to be completed in the next three years - wildly optimistic, as very little work gets done during the winter.

Basescu's involvement and Greenpeace's desire to raise its profile in Romania - it has only had an office here for four years and has yet to start recruiting a mass membership - have turned the DN66A into a symbol of the inevitable conflict between development and conservation in a country that saw joining the European Union on New Year's Day as the threshold to the shiny modern world. Romania's relatively slow economic progress has helped preserve its ancient forests and unmechanised farmlands; all that may be about to change.

Paun claims that this area is the only "intact forest landscape" in central, southern and western Europe - in other words, anywhere in Europe outside Russia and Finland. There are, he says, 100,000 hectares of forest in which man's footprint has been sufficiently light to leave the landscape close to its original state. The term "intact forest landscape" is, however, a controversial one. Even Zoran Acimov, director of the Retezat national park and president of the regional branch of Romania's small ecological party, is suspicious of it. He calls the notion "interesting", but seems unconvinced of its validity.

Ioan Stetca, who is based at the Forest Research and Management Institute in Bucharest, says there is disagreement among foresters over what constitutes "natural" or "intact" forest, and that different countries apply different definitions. Greenpeace, he says, has based its claim on its own criteria. While expressing caution over the semantics, he nevertheless supports Paun's contention that the size of this forest makes it unique in central Europe and that construction has been started without a proper inquiry - "under the mattress", as Stetca puts it. Critics of the road argue that there are existing routes north and south of the forest, and hint darkly that the project is all about racking up property prices in the area. Land prices adjacent to the proposed road have risen fivefold in the past couple of years; someone is making a killing.

Acimov shows me the damage done so far. A 7km section of the road built in the summer has cut through the southern tip of the park - even though Retezat is supposed to be a protected area - and wrought havoc with the flow of the river, which appears virtually to have dried up. He says birds' breeding grounds have already been affected, and that, even if there was water, animals could not now reach it because the sides of the road, which is two or three metres higher than the river bed, are too steep. He looks more and more angry as we drive down this new stretch of road, and at one points stops the car to berate a group of workers, huddled round a camp fire, for leaving plastic bags at the roadside.

Acimov dislikes the new road, but even more he fears what it will bring. "Buildings will spread all along it," he says, "and once buildings exist then around them other human developments will be made." Similarly, Stetca does not think the road itself will overnight create an ecological catastrophe, but fears that in 20 years' time the habitat of the existing wildlife will be significantly eroded if uncontrolled building occurs and feeder roads into the forest are built. Paun is in no doubt: "If this road is built, it will be the beginning of the end for the forest. Just forget about it."

Supporters of the road say it will attract tourists, but Acimov reckons they will be the wrong sort of tourists. "There are tourists who like hiking," he says, referring to the backpackers who currently make the trek, "and then there are the Sunday or picnic tourists who come just for a barbecue and a beer. This category is not very welcome for us. Once they have this accessible road for every car, they will spread across the valley. It will cost us a lot of effort to keep an eye on them."

His description of the likely impact on wildlife, uttered in his careful, considered English, makes me chuckle. "The interaction between a wild animal as powerful as a bear and some young picnickers is not always very happy ..." The picnickers turn into the picnic; the bear - once it is deemed to be a killer - gets shot. More likely, though, is that as humans eat into their territory, the animals become scavengers - what Acimov dismissively terms "garbage bears".

There is another side to this argument, of course, put by the politicians who think the road will regenerate the region, providing touristic jobs to fill the vacuum left by the contraction in heavy industry. In a generation's time, the hope is that the Jiu valley will not be synonymous with pollution and political violence (the area's miners were bussed into Bucharest in 1990 to quell anti-government protests), but with hiking, skiing and the beauty of its forests, reduced in extent perhaps but by no means wrecked. That is the dream which has been sold to the electors - and to politicians voters matter more than bears.

I go with Acimov to the town hall in Uricani - a small, soot-blackened mining town where acid rain has reduced the trees to shrivelled stumps - to meet the mayor, Danut Buhaescu.

And what a meeting. Buhaescu is haranguing; Acimov is sighing; the vice-mayor, who, like Buhaescu, speaks no English, looks nonplussed; the secretary of the council and Acimov get into an argument over whether the road does indeed intersect the park and go off to consult maps on the internet; a woman arrives who has nothing directly to do with the road - she represents local villagers dispossessed by Ceausescu in the early 1980s who want their land back (prices are rising, remember) and is involved in a long-running legal battle with the mayor; finally a stubbly man in a leather jacket arrives who says he lives near Waterloo station. The interpreting is done by a young woman who tells me later she is married to a professional footballer; she struggles on but is a little overwhelmed by everyone speaking more or less simultaneously. Amazingly, it is the first time Acimov and the mayor have met, so I feel that my visit has achieved something.

After about an hour and a half of whatever is the Romanian equivalent of "more heat than light", the mayor resorts to the preferred local method of quelling apparently intractable disputes - he produces a large bottle of palinca, the deadly, double-distilled local brandy. After two glasses, I have lost all interest in the road; in fact, I can barely see the door. The mayor presents me with flags of Romania and Uricani, and insists we join him at a local restaurant - owned by the vice-mayor - for spicy sausages and, yes, more palinca. There, photographs are taken, the mayor embraces me, and the vice-mayor shows me his large and impressively mounted collection of ornamental daggers. There are three bear skins on the floor of his office-cum-museum, including one from a cub.

The tricky thing is that both sides may be right. Hombre thinks the promise of the road is "dust in the eyes" of the voters in the Jiu valley. Apart from the 400 or so construction jobs - by their nature short-term - there is no guarantee that the road will bring prosperity, except to the shadowy figures who have been buying up land along its path and are talking up the prices. It is all an illusion, he insists, conjured up in a political bidding war between rival parties, a sop to towns where the unemployment rate is 40% or more.

But go to those towns - Petrosani, Uricani, Lupeni, Vulcan - and you see why those voters are so desperate for some hope. Tiny Roma children sit begging outside the church of St Nicholas in the main street in Petrosani; a man with no legs screams out in thanks and wonderment when I donate 10 lei (about €3); elderly men and women cough, spit and splutter in the densely polluted air; here even the stray dogs - ubiquitous in Romania - are scraggier and dirtier than elsewhere, the coal smuts turning the coats of even the whitest dog a murky grey.

Catalin Docea, the editor of the Gazeta Vaii Jiului (Jiu Valley Gazette), bridles at the shorthand usually used to describe Petrosani, where his paper has its office - "depressed mining town". There is more to Petrosani than mining, he insists, and depression isn't the predominant mood. But even he says the road is vital to the long-term future of the area, and that Uricani, because of its isolated location, would die if it wasn't built. Bears or people - that conundrum again.

Smooth advocates of the project such as Attila Dezsi, the youthful deputy prefect of Hunedoara county, argue that the conundrum can be solved - that road and forest, people and bears, can exist side by side. "As a student, I protested against the transport of nuclear waste by train," he says. "The environment matters a great deal to me, and I would not destroy it."

As a concession to opponents of the road, a commission has been established to assess the ecological impact of the section built thus far, to suggest modifications (Acimov says "echo chambers" to allow wildlife to cross the road and access the river would alleviate some of the damage), and to advise on what should happen over the rest of the route. Dezsi says the road will go ahead and invites me back in three years for the official opening, when, he says, it will be clear that the predictions of environmental disaster were misplaced. Acimov, who will sit on the new commission, doubts whether the project, already under way and so closely linked to the president, can now be stopped; for him, the task is to make it as palatable as possible. But Paun believes the fight is far from over. "I think it will be stopped," he says.

After our restless night in the log cabin, Hombre takes me for a hike through the forest and up into the biosphere area. The Dr Martens prove even more useless here, and I manage to slip three times, once almost tumbling into a stream. I also slide down a hillside and put my left boot through a clump of pretty-looking white flowers - virgin forest no more. I feel grisly. The combination of cold, altitude and dust in the cabin, and the after-effects of the palinca, have reduced me to a wheezing, asthmatic wreck who can longer see the wood for the ... No, we shouldn't go there.

It is time to slither back down the mountain. I tell Hombre I will return in the spring, when conditions are easier and roadbuilding is due to resume in earnest after its winter hibernation. The battle over the DN66A may only just be beginning, and its course will tell us a great deal about who will win the war between conservationists and developers, traditionalists and modernisers, in the new Romania.